The Hurt Locker
a movie review by Heather Craig
Everything I know about bombs I learned from movies and television, mostly Burn Notice (Thank you, Fiona). Also, when movie and TV characters in stealthy situations give each other hand signals, I virtually never understand what they mean. That said, I had no trouble following the action in The Hurt Locker, a film about a small Army team in 2004 Baghdad whose job it is to locate improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and render them harmless.
The film follows Bravo Company, which, with only 38 days left in the very dangerous Baghdad assignment, gets new staff sergeant Will James (Jeremy Renner) after the last one gets killed on the job. James joins Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), who is very by the book and committed to following steps with dismantling procedures, and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), who lives in utter terror, fully expecting them all to be blown up at any moment.
“He’s rowdy,” is Eldridge’s initial summation of James’ character. “He’s reckless,” corrects disapproving Sanborn. “You’re a wild man,” marvels Colonel Reed (David Morse) to James after the dismantling of a particularly gigantic bomb. James’ disregard for protocol does not endear him to his team. “He’s inspiring,” Eldridge tells his Army counselor. “He’s going to get us all killed.” Still, everyone is immediately aware what an unusual affinity for bombs James has. He has successfully dismantled over 800 bombs in his career and his confidence is pretty absolute.
In most movies with military teams the men are best friends, even brothers. Here, they respect each other, and they would die for each other, but Eldridge and Sanborn do not entirely trust team leader James to do what is in their (or his own) best interest. I had never before considered what it could be to put your life in the hands of someone you do not entirely like, let alone trust. Still, they are stuck with each other, very nearly every minute of the day, for the duration of the rotation.
Jeremy Renner may be best known for playing Jeffrey Dahmer in Dahmer, and came into living rooms playing Amber Tamblyn’s partner in TV’s The Unusuals, gives us a fascinating portrait here. At first, James seems to be emotionless except when filled with bravado. He doesn’t even truly react when punched in the face by an irate team member. Even when horsing around, wrestling with his teammates after a drinking binge, his actions do not feel natural and he pushes things too far. But we eventually see that James is (too?) controlled, allowing himself true moments of emotion only when he is completely alone. In these scenes of solitary emotion, Renner is superb. This is especially clear when the team comes across a body of someone James knows. He doesn’t get dialogue to get his feelings across and so we have to rely completely on his expression to know what he is feeling.
This scene is especially gruesome. James has to do something grisly with the body, and from the sounds of distress in the theater, I was not the only one who found this scene to be a bit too much. It is a war movie, after all. Tensions run high from the opening scene, and I spent much of the movie with my hands over my mouth. In one particularly stressful scene (with a surprise, and surprisingly brief, appearance by an multiple Oscar nominee Ralph Fiennes), when an insurgent is shot in difficult circumstances, the men behind me in the theater cheered out loud and the sudden noise behind me scared me out of my skin.
Director Kathryn Bigelow does not make this a political movie. No overt statement regarding our presence in Iraq, either pro or con, is ever made here. While it is clear that there are really no winners here either among soldiers or civilians, the point of Mark Boal’s script (he also wrote the Iraq war movie In the Valley of Elah) is the daily toll this kind of stress takes on the men of Bravo unit. According to that (un)impeachable source, Wikipedia, 40% of all coalition deaths in the Iraqi war are caused by improvised explosive devices. That kind of responsibility and danger has got to change a person, whether in Eldridge’s terror, or James’ unnatural control.
